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Small-town heart beats within us all

Wichita
Published 10:51 a.m. CT Nov. 9, 2017

Vice President Mike Pence hugs Evelyn Holcombe at Florseville High School during a stop on Nov. 8, 2017, in Floresville, Texas. A man opened fire inside a church in Sutherland Springs on Sunday, killing and wounding many; Holcombe was in the church during the shooting but escaped.(Photo: Eric Gay, AP)

The glitzy neon splash of Las Vegas and the just-plain-folks spirit of little Sutherland Springs represent opposite ends of America.

Yet these towns are now forever bound by a heinous reality: Two of the deadliest mass shootings in recent U.S. history have shattered each in the space of five weeks.

Vegas’ nightmare began the first Sunday in October, when a madman with an arsenal of weaponry gunned down 58 people and injured scores more at a country music festival.

The nation had hardly regained its footing when, the first Sunday in November, yet another gunman bent on evil killed more than two dozen church-goers and injured 20 or so in the worst massacre in modern Texas history.

The Sutherland Springs assailant all but took out an entire congregation as he, spraying gunfire, burst into the modest First Baptist Church during morning worship. In just minutes, he turned the one-blinking-light, unincorporated town 30 miles southeast of San Antonio into a horror set.

Whether church worshippers in South Texas or music lovers in Vegas, all the dead and injured were innocent victims simply going about their lives. Not only are they lost to us, their lives cut cruelly short, but they leave families, friends and neighbors to the all-too-familiar dirge of heartbreak and healing.

Sutherland Springs is not the first church shooting in Texas to explode the myth of small-town safety. Some of you will recall the gunman, clad in battle fatigues and yelling “This is war,” who opened fire on a First Baptist congregation in the East Texas town of Daingerfield back in 1980, killing five and wounding 11.

But a massacre the size of Sunday’s church tragedy takes a small town and its residents to their knees. Hearing of victims who range from age 5 to 72, most shot as they sat in their familiar church pews — it’s enough to take us all to our knees.

And for a community with only a couple hundred residents, the victims’ names will be no abstract list. In small towns like Sutherland Springs, these will be relatives and classmates, neighbors and friends. And so often, it’s the churches that knit the community together.

As we hang our heads in this tragedy, we cannot forget that we’ve barely caught our breath from the last. We know in our heads that mass shootings account for only a tiny fraction of the killings in America. But we can see that the frequency of these large-scale homicides is increasing.

And with three of the deadliest having occurred in just the last 18 months — Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs and the killing of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. — a sense of helplessness is growing nationally.

We take pride in our Lone Star grit and resiliency. But the Sutherland Springs massacre hits hard —- so many of us still carry small-town hearts, even if we have learned to wear big-city armor. Thoughts and prayers — even the most sincere — are only a beginning.